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Comment by ah27182 | Hacker News Reader

I think its inevitable that something (either from humans or nature) will figure out how to digest plastic. Similar to the Devonian Wood Crisis.

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Bacteria and fungi are like, "Hold my beer...":

Bacteria: https://microbenotes.com/ideonella-sakaiensis-plastic-eating...

Fungi: https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/11/04/plastic-eating-m...

It's unfortunate that the mushrooms grown on plastic waste absorb chemicals that make them unsafe to eat. What a gamechanger otherwise.

From the linked article:

"The oyster mushroom is capable of decomposing plastic while still creating an edible mushroom. This opens up doors for its use as an at-home recycling system."

The mushroom strain is edible yes, but I went looking around mycology forums and it is my understanding that decomposing plastic causes them to absorb chemicals that make them unfit to eat for humans. I think there's some overlap between "can be eaten" and "would be bad for you long term".

That's not to say there isn't a use for the mushrooms in some further process of dispersal or breakdown (animal feed, biogas...) but I don't think these can go in the stew pot.

Can you provide a link to the forums you referenced?

This thread for example - the oyster mushrooms break down the plastic polymers into smaller polymers, but you don't necessarily want to be eating those either. There's also the added complexity of there being many types of plastic, with many types of additives, and unless your waste plastic is single-source it is difficult to know exactly what is being released into your mushrooms when they're working on the plastic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mycology/comments/10wboly/blue_oyst...

Sure, but in evolutionary timescales a hundred years of selective pressure from newly abundant plastic waste might produce an organism optimized to exploit the niche from human landfills and ocean trash in a breezy 20 million or so years.

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